17 Lessons From Ann Miura-Ko (Co-Founding Partner @ Floodgate)

Lessons from Ann Miura-Ko

• You cannot convince yourself to be passionate in a space. You either are or you are not.
• Product value, business model, and ecosystem cannot live in a vacuum and instead must work together simultaneously. Your business is not operating at 100% efficiency if any of these three areas live in a silo.
• Find technical or societal shifts that cause inflection points. Start noticing trendlines so you can better predict where the world is going.
• Ideas don’t mean much. Startups only work if you can build an ecosystem around it.
• Invest in people that are genetically wired differently. Some of the best teams look like an island of misfit toys to outsiders. You want to hire people that are capable of thinking outside the box.
• Your business model is you company’s backbone. Pick the wrong business model, and your company is doomed from the start.
• Founding teams must deeply understand both the product and the marketing around that product. Understanding one without the other equals frustration.
• Technical is easier to predict than market risk. Timing adoption is incredibly hard.
• Focus on the metrics that matter. Don’t showcase hockey stick in areas that don’t matter to the business.